Then followed a passage about death, which Arrian, during our last conversation, had marked for my special attention: “_But if at any moment He ceases to supply you with the things needful for your existence, then take heed! In that moment He is sounding the bugle for you to cease the conflict. He is saying to you, ‘Come!’ And whither? Into no land of terrors. Simply into that same region from which you entered into being. Into the company of such existences as are friendly and akin to you. Into the elements. Such part as was fire in you will depart into fire; such part of earth as was in you, into earth; such part of air or wind as was in you, into air or wind; of water, into water. No Hades! No Acheron! No Cocytus! No Pyriphlegethon! All things are full of Gods and dæmons!_” By this I think he meant “good Gods and guardian angels.” He concluded thus, “_Having such thoughts as these in his heart, looking up to the sun, the moon, and the stars, and enjoying the earth and the sea, man has no more right to call himself deserted than to call himself unhelped._” It was not clear to me how I could continue to call myself “helped” when I was on the point of being dissolved into the four elements. If I were a criminal, successful in escaping punishment on earth, I might deem it “help” (after a fashion) to know that I should be equally successful after quitting the earth, because I need not fear Hades and its three rivers as enemies. But where were the “friends”? The four elements promised but cold friendship! Arrian’s comment rose to my mind, and a second time I assented to it, “I cannot say that this satisfies me.” Epictetus was so averse from anything like cant or insincerity of expression that I was amazed—as I still am—that he could use, in such a context, the words “friendly and akin.” Surely Sappho’s cry was truer, when she wandered alone through the woods where she had once been loved by Phaon— “This place is now dead dust. He was its life.” What would it profit that my “fiery part” should return to fire? It might as well go astray into water, or earth, or into extinction, as far as I cared. To be still loved would have been to be still in some kind of home. But who would love my four elements? I should be “not I,” but only four severed portions of what had once been “I,” fragments incapable even of mourning, wandering among “dead dust,” no better than “dead dust” themselves! How infinitely should I have preferred that Epictetus—if he could not honestly accept the confident hope of Socrates concerning a life after death,—should have said simply this, “As to what Zeus does with our souls after death, others think they know much. I know nothing, except that He does what is best.”